I’m sure this is going to hit home for a few of you. We’re all technologists, or at the very least, users of technology. Being a millennial, I love leveraging new systems, methods of communication, and advanced technologies designed to make life easier.
However, I also remember that there was a time when we could simply “disconnect.” I remember it was easy for one simple reason – there was nothing to connect to.
Our world is increasingly becoming connected and digital. The latest Cisco Visual Networking Index indicates some interesting trends going into 2021:

Annual global IP traffic will reach 3.3 ZB by 2021. In 2016, global IP traffic was 1.2 ZB per year or 96 EB (one billion Gigabytes) per month.
Global IP traffic will increase nearly threefold over the next 5 years, and will have increased 127-fold from 2005 to 2021.
Busy-hour internet traffic is growing more rapidly than average internet traffic. Busy-hour (or the busiest 60-minute period in a day) internet traffic increased 51 percent in 2016, compared with 32-percent growth in average traffic.
Smartphone traffic will exceed PC traffic by 2021. In 2016, PCs accounted for 46 percent of total IP traffic, but by 2021 PCs will account for only 25 percent of traffic. Smartphones will account for 33 percent of total IP traffic in 2021, up from 13 percent in 2016.

By 2021, traffic from wireless and mobile devices will account for more than 63 percent of total IP traffic.
A study done by We Are Social found:

Several internet service providers suffered an outage for longer than an hour on Monday due to a configuration error by Tier 1 network provider Level 3.
Service providers including Spectrum, Verizon, Cox, RCN, and Comcast’s Xfinity began experiencing disruptions across the U.S. at approximately 1 pm, and Level 3 said in a statement provided to Wired that the issue was resolved about 90 minutes later.
An Arbor Networks engineer told Wired that the disruption was caused by a misconfigured Autonomous System (AS), which issued incorrect IP address data, causing the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to spring a “route leak.”
“On Monday, Nov. 6, our network experienced a service disruption affecting some customers with IP-based services,” Level3 said in a statement. “The disruption was caused by a configuration error. We know how important these services are to our customers. Our technicians were able to restore service within approximately 90 minutes.”
Comcast apologized for what it called “an external network error” over Twitter. The outage recalls the massive outage caused by a DDoS attack on Tier 1 network provider Dyn last year.
CenturyLink agreed to acquired Level 3 for roughly $34 billion in cash and stock a year ago, and the deal recently closed, creating one of the largest infrastructure networks in the world.

At least 195 websites belonging to U.S. President Donald Trump, his family, or businesses he is involved with were victims of DNS hijacking in 2013, with the last of them repaired only last week, the Associated Press (AP) reported Saturday.
The Trump Organization denied the domain names were compromised, AP reports, but records reviewed by AP and cybersecurity experts reportedly redirected website visitors to servers in St. Petersburg, Russia, containing malware. Affected domains were repaired within days of AP contacting the Trump Organization about the hacks.
The connection to Russia raises the spectre of alleged Russian hacking activities during the U.S. Presidential campaign.
The affected domain names, which were attacked in two waves in August and September 2013, include donaldtrump.org, donaldtrumpexecutiveoffice.com, donaldtrumprealty.com and barrontrump.com. The Trump Organization and its affiliates own at least 3,300 domain names, many of which are not in use, including some of those hacked.
At least 250 “shadow” subdomains were created by hackers, Mother Jones reports. IP addresses associated with the subdomains are also associated with an IP address for one or more domain previously used to deploy an exploit kit. The servers were hosted by the Petersburg Internet Network, which has drawn criticism for hosting malicious actors.
“If Cogent started blocking routes from the Petersburg Internet Network Ltd.(AS44050) until they clean up their act, it might save

I recently led a session at the latest Software-Defined Enterprise Conference and Expo (SDxE) where we discussed how connected “things” are going to reshape our business, the industry, and our lives. When I asked the people in that full room how many had more than two devices that could connect into the cloud, pretty much every hand went up.
We’re living in a truly interconnected world. One that continues to generate more data, find more ways to give analog systems a digital heartbeat, and one that shapes lives using new technologies.
A recent Cisco Visual Networking Index report indicated that smartphone traffic will exceed PC traffic by 2021. In 2016, PCs accounted for 46 percent of total IP traffic, but by 2021 PCs will account for only 25 percent of traffic. Smartphones will account for 33 percent of total IP traffic in 2021, up from 13 percent in 2016. PC-originated traffic will grow at a CAGR of 10 percent, while TVs, tablets, smartphones, and Machine-to- Machine (M2M) modules will have traffic growth rates of 21 percent, 29 percent, 49 percent, and 49 percent, respectively.
Cloud services are accelerated in part by the unprecedented amounts of data being generated by not only people, but also machines and things. And, not just generated, but stored as well. The latest Cisco GCI report estimates that 600 ZB will be generated by all people, machines, and things by 2020, up from 145 ZB generated in 2015. And, by 2020, data center storage installed capacity will

DreamHost is considering its next move after a judge last week ordered the Los Angeles-based web hosting company to comply with a government warrant seeking information about subscribers to the anti-Trump website disruptj20.org.
DreamHost’s general counsel Chris Ghazarian said that while overall he sees the decision as a win, the company would have preferred even more content being removed from the warrant or the warrant being invalidated all together.
“Now our team and I are considering our next steps which are essentially whether or not we are going to appeal, and we’ll make that decision very soon,” Ghazarian said in an interview with The WHIR.
Chief Judge Robert Morin ruled on Thursday that DreamHost had to turn over subscriber data, but under a much narrower scope than first anticipated. Morin told the District of Columbia Superior Court that in an order to “balance the First Amendment protections and the government’s need for this information” he would oversee which data prosecutors’ intend to seize and use of the data to ensure it is limited to individuals connected to the riots.
Ghazarian said that the Department of Justice (DoJ) pulled back quite a bit in what they initially asked for, including removing the request for IP addresses.
“The entire process overall has been a win because I don’t think anybody really expected the government number one to back down from their original warrant, especially since we tried to have a professional

DreamHost is considering its next move after a judge last week ordered the Los Angeles-based web hosting company to comply with a government warrant seeking information about subscribers to the anti-Trump website disruptj20.org.
DreamHost’s general counsel Chris Ghazarian said that while overall he sees the decision as a win, the company would have preferred even more content being removed from the warrant or the warrant being invalidated all together.
“Now our team and I are considering our next steps which are essentially whether or not we are going to appeal, and we’ll make that decision very soon,” Ghazarian said in an interview with The WHIR.
Chief Judge Robert Morin ruled on Thursday that DreamHost had to turn over subscriber data, but under a much narrower scope than first anticipated. Morin told the District of Columbia Superior Court that in an order to “balance the First Amendment protections and the government’s need for this information” he would oversee which data prosecutors’ intend to seize and use of the data to ensure it is limited to individuals connected to the riots.
Ghazarian said that the Department of Justice (DoJ) pulled back quite a bit in what they initially asked for, including removing the request for IP addresses.
“The entire process overall has been a win because I don’t think anybody really expected the government number one to back down from their original warrant, especially since we tried to have a professional

(Bloomberg View) — It was inevitable that the fallout from violent protests in Virginia organized by white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups would extend to the virtual world of the web. The internet is our modern commons. But the past few days have shown how fast we can glide down the slippery slope to web censorship.
Facebook and Twitter were perfectly within their rights, legally and ethically, when they banned accounts of certain hate groups and their leaders. These are private companies enforcing their own rules about how their services and platforms can be used. Providers of web infrastructure, however, must be held to a stricter standard since they act as choke points that can prevent an individual or group from being able to express themselves online.
Cloudflare CEO Says Company Could Not Remain “Neutral” as it Bans Daily Stormer
Soon after the Charlottesville events, domain name registrars GoDaddy and Google separately decided to no longer serve the Daily Stormer after the neo-Nazi site wrote a disparaging story about Heather Heyer, the woman who died after being struck by a car while protesting the Charlottesville rally. Registrars act as a sort of phone book for the internet by turning a raw IP address — like 62.23.150.94 — into a line of text, like “Bloomberg.com.” Without GoDaddy or Google, it would be impossible for people to find the Daily Stormer online. Shortly afterwards, CloudFlare, which offers firewall services for

Brought to you by MSPmentor
A massive, worldwide ransomware attack is currently unfolding, powered from more than 11,625 distinct IP addresses in 133 different countries, experts at cyber security vendor Comodo said today.
The campaign was first detected on Aug. 9, and more than 62,000 phishing emails related to the attack were detected at Comodo-protected endpoints alone, as of Friday.
Emails use social engineering to induce users into opening a docx, pdf, jpg, zip or other file, containing the ransomware, dubbed “IKARUSdilapidated,” after a phrase that appears in the code string.
“If the user does as instructed, the macros then save and run a binary file that downloads the actual encryption Trojan, which will encrypt all files that match particular extensions (including the common ones on most machines),” Comodo researchers wrote in a report that was provided to MSPmentor in draft form, because it is still being completed. “Filenames are converted to a unique 16 letter and number combination with the .locky file extension.”
Locky is a very common type of ransomware that emerged in 2016 and has been used in a wide range of cyber attacks since.
“The attachment is an archive file, with the name ‘E 2017-08-09 (580).vbs’ where 580 is a number changing for each email and vbs is an extension which varies as well,” the report says.
Many endpoint protection solutions have been updated to detect Locky ransomware but as a new variant, emails containing

Brought to you by MSPmentor
A massive, worldwide ransomware attack is currently unfolding, powered from more than 11,625 distinct IP addresses in 133 different countries, experts at cyber security vendor Comodo said today.
The campaign was first detected on Aug. 9, and more than 62,000 phishing emails related to the attack were detected at Comodo-protected endpoints alone, as of Friday.
Emails use social engineering to induce users into opening a docx, pdf, jpg, zip or other file, containing the ransomware, dubbed “IKARUSdilapidated,” after a phrase that appears in the code string.
“If the user does as instructed, the macros then save and run a binary file that downloads the actual encryption Trojan, which will encrypt all files that match particular extensions (including the common ones on most machines),” Comodo researchers wrote in a report that was provided to MSPmentor in draft form, because it is still being completed. “Filenames are converted to a unique 16 letter and number combination with the .locky file extension.”
Locky is a very common type of ransomware that emerged in 2016 and has been used in a wide range of cyber attacks since.
“The attachment is an archive file, with the name ‘E 2017-08-09 (580).vbs’ where 580 is a number changing for each email and vbs is an extension which varies as well,” the report says.
Many endpoint protection solutions have been updated to detect Locky ransomware but as a new variant, emails containing

Brought to you by Data Center Knowledge
Everybody was probably sporting smiles on Monday at Hurricane Electric’s headquarters in Fremont, California. Why? The tier 2 network operator, which runs a vital part of the internet’s backbone, announced it’s become the first network in the world to connect to over 4,000 IPv6 networks. If they handed out gold medals for such things, this would be the company’s second trophy for the same category. In 2010 it became the first to connect to 1,000 IPv6 networks.
That likely doesn’t mean much to the average Joe or Jane on the street and it probably won’t attract more than passing interest from most IT workers, but it’s an important milestone for anyone who earns their living by harnessing the infrastructure of the internet — like service providers and data center operators. In case you don’t know, Hurricane Electric is both.
IPv6 — for Internet Protocol version 6 — is the new addressing system for the internet that will eventually replace IPv4, which has been used since the ancient days of ARPANET. IPv4 works just fine, but as a 32-bit system is limited to 4.29 billion addresses. That seemed like enough to last forever when it was first pressed into service in 1983, but that was before the days of the public internet, which began to rapidly eat through available IP addresses by the late 1990s. The limitation became even more alarming around 2007 with introduction of the iPhone, which heralded the coming of the